Heart Condition

Chronic Illness Chronicle

	Got little twisted up pieces of metal in my chest. I go to the doctor and sure enough I’ve wasted three hundred and forty dollars finding out what I already know.
	Doctor says, “You’ve got little twisted up pieces of metal in your chest.”
	“Oh, okay. What do I do?”
	“I’m afraid it’s post-heredity. You’ll have to either receive surgery or learn to breathe softer.”
	As one does I work a job with small pay and big labor so right off the bat I have to quit, and even if I could work I can’t afford the little-twisted-up-pieces-of-metalectomy with my small money.
	There’s a going-away party for me at the Small-Money-Big-Labor Factory and we have a pizza party, but I can’t go because it’s for employees only. They post the photo of the team on the company Instagram and tag me, but I’m not in the photo, because I couldn’t go. On the desk there’s a card I never received and I wonder what happened to it after the photo was taken. I close the app and go back to googling, “soft breathing techniques how to soft breathing soft breathing workshops near me how to.”
	The money runs out that week. I stop paying my rent and am evicted onto the street minutes later, but my city is wall to wall hills. It’s actually one big hill with several smaller hills built onto it which makes it actually the worst possible thing to traverse when you’ve got little twisted up pieces of metal in your chest.
	So I’m laying down on the sidewalk waiting to die when three police officers walk over and tell me I can’t live on the ground anymore because my body is a trip hazard to all the Microsoft employees nearby trying to contribute to the economy. Naturally I look up and say, “Michael Soft,” because I have hearing damage from growing up on a ranch, and eventually the war. They all think I’m making fun of them or inebriated and begin savagely beating me within an inch of my life, which bodes poorly for my newfound soft breathing lifestyle.
	When I come to, I’m in jail and my chest is aching something terrible. The thought that it’s related to my condition gives me a flood of anxiety which causes me to breathe weird, and it becomes a cycle until my panic attack causes me to faint.
	In my mind I dream of my job at the factory and my precious small money. The warehouse is empty except for the moon which has crashed through the ceiling. There is a large sum of small money on its face but I cannot see it because I am asleep. I can’t see anything.
	When I awake I’m on a prison bus, handcuffed to the seat in front of me. I ask the prison bus driver what happened.
	“You were in court,” he tells me. “It was very bad.” It makes me nervous that he turns all the way around in his seat to talk to me so I don’t say anything else.
	Shortly after, however, I see him take out his phone and start typing something into YouTube. I can feel my chest tighten at the thought of him crashing the prison bus into something awful like a regular bus, or maybe a different prison bus.
	Eventually he turns around again and holds up the phone to show me a video titled “Hard Time For Bedtime” with half a million views. In it I am in a courtroom slumped over in a chair unconscious and being accused of resisting arrest and disrespecting the court. Everyone is yelling at me including my public defender, who is clapping aggressively in front of my face. At one point my lawyer holds me from behind and swings me around. He talks in a high pitched voice, but no one is convinced that it is coming from me. The judge bangs his gavel and I am sentenced to four years of hard labor.
	The video ends and the recommendations for other videos appears on the screen, and although I am concerned because of how the bus driver is still not looking at the road, I am relieved that I am popular online.

	Before I know it, it’s my first day of prison labor. Most people are shackled together, but they gave me a large, metal ball instead. I ask the prisoner next to me if they always make the new guy have the big, metal ball, and he says no.
	 Today we are all on the side of a road hitting rocks with sledgehammers. You get one nickel every week if you do a good job hitting the rocks into littler rocks, and if you do a bad job they shoot you with a gun. I am overcome with chest pain at the thought of being shot with anything so I focus on how pretty the guards’ horses are.
	The chain gang, it turns out, is no place for a soft-breather, especially one so new to the trade. Soon into hitting the rocks my chest begins to hurt and in my anxiety I lie down on the road in hopes that they will stomp me on the head with their horses or sentence me to solitary confinement where I can practice my breathing.
	No one has ever tried this before in the South for fear of being stomped on the head by a horse or shot with a gun so none of the guards know how to handle the situation. After seven hours a hostage negotiator is dispatched by the state police to try and reason with me. He is crouched behind the door to his Interceptor with his megaphone, licking his lips nervously.
	“Now, son, you don’t have to do this.” He takes off his big, dumb hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. “You can let all these people go and we can see about moving you to a better facility. Maybe something with a few more amenities. Maybe some television, or another phone call every week.”
	I call back, “I’m not doing anything. Everybody can leave at any time. I’m laying on the ground with a big, metal ball shackled to my ankle.”
	The negotiator turns back towards the Staties and shakes his head. Calls are made for reinforcements and within a few hours there are three hundred different people on the scene.
	There are police officers, prison officers, ATF, FBI, and CIA officers. There is a helicopter with the letters IRS on the side circling high above us. On the shoulder of the road is a SWAT van with a K9 unit, a single German shepherd, pulling and panting against its leash. There are no more horses anywhere that I can see.
	Minutes pass and I hear the word, “Waco,” from somewhere in the crowd. Everybody adjusts nervously and I close my eyes to focus on my breathing. It is nearly impossible to breathe softly with this many guns pointed at me.
	One of the guys on the chain gang crawls over and says, “Boss, maybe we should give it up,” but before I can ask him not to call me boss right now, one of the members of the state’s forces gets antsy and shoots the dog setting off a wave of panic through the crowd.
	Bullets zip every which way, tearing through the trees, the bark of the rifles creating a deafening wall of sound. I curl up and press my face against the dirt, ears ringing, as hundreds of firearms scream out through the brush. Eventually even the helicopter tumbles down into the forest, the impact of the crash shaking the ground beneath my body.
	Minutes pass and the gunfire begins to taper off, and then eventually it stops altogether. Once I am sure it is over I peer up from the dirt to assess the damage. Every last one of the police and adjacent members are dead, especially the dog which has mostly disintegrated from the amount of times it has been shot.
	The prisoners are all unharmed, safe in the cover of the ditch we were laying in. A couple manage to free themselves from their chains and then make their way over to try and shoot the chain connecting my shackle to its big, metal ball, but I ask them not to do that because it is stressing me out.
	They honor my wishes and leave me there, wandering off into the forests around us, when I realize I’m doing it. I’m breathing softly for the first time. I can’t feel my chest rise and fall. I can’t hear the soft wheezing I’ve known all my life. The sun slips down beneath the world around me and I’m breathing so softly no one can hear it, not even me. The moon rises and peers down at me and my perfectly still body. No one has ever breathed as softly as I have, as I am doing right now. There are little twisted up pieces of metal in my chest, but I think it’s alright. I think it’s alright because I’m breathing so softly. So softly. So very, very softly. I think I’m going to die lonely and in silence.